Structures in reticles and in layers produced on semiconductor wafers by photolithography are generally designed to have square corners. In practice, however, the limitations inherent in fabrication techniques inevitably result in some rounding of the corners. Such rounding may have adverse effects on the performance of microcircuits that incorporate the structures. For example, rounding of the corners of a contact pad reduces the effective contact area and may thus increase the contact resistance. The extent to which corners are rounded may be qualitatively observed in scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of the reticle or wafer, but there is a need for reliable, quantitative techniques for automatically measuring corner curvatures in such images.
Various methods are known in the art of image processing for estimating the curvature of a boundary or edge in an image. For example, Lee et al. describe a method for estimation of curvature using cubic polynomial fitting, in “Estimation of Curvature from Sampled Noisy Data,” Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 1993 (Proceedings of CVPR '93, IEEE), pages 536-541, which is incorporated herein by reference.
As another example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,714,679, whose disclosure is incorporated herein by reference, describes a method for analyzing a boundary of an object in an image. The boundaries are represented as a set of indexed vertices, which are generated by parsing the boundaries into a set of segments. In one embodiment, the curvature of the boundary is approximated by taking the derivative of the local tangent to the boundary. The boundary is segmented by locating the local maxima in the curvature and walking both sides of each maximum until a threshold curvature change on each side of the maximum has been met.
As still another example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,195,461, whose disclosure is incorporated herein by reference, describes an image processing method for accurately reproducing an edge part at which luminance abruptly changes. This patent describes methods for analyzing and synthesizing a curve on a plane based on the unit tangent vector to the curve.